Google - Your New Life Coach

By Joanne Casey

Account Executive

Google has further extended its move towards personalisation this month and announced the launch of its iGoogle service.

One feature of iGoogle is the Gadget Maker where seven “gadgets” are available to the user to personalise and create their own homepage. These can be published to a public directory for all to use or can be sent as feeds to family and friends.

Google has also introduced location based results. Any user who has provided a location within Google Maps will now receive results targeted at their location. For example, if a user has entered a default location into Google Maps and types in “library”, the results will bring up the user’s local library. This new feature is in addition to Google’s updated universal search which now displays web, image, and video search results.

All this is an attempt to further improve online search results and ensure that results are as relevant to the individual user as much as possible. Marrisa Mayer, Google VP has said that they are “shooting for…a search engine that understands ‘me’” but it is questionable how far Google will go and push the boundaries of human privacy to fulfil their mission.

When asked recently about how Google might look in five years’ time, Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt said: “We are very early in the total information we have within Google. The algorithms will get better and we will get better at personalization. The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask questions such as ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job shall I take?’”

Although it would be interesting to see what results Google would display for such questions it has raiised some concerns about how much information Google holds about its users. The European Commission has began to question how Google manages users’ search data. A privacy advisory group composed of representatives from all of the European Union countries recently sent Google a letter expressing concern over their new privacy policy which was announced in March.

New figures just released show that Google continue to dominate the search engine market. In April 2007, 55% of all search queries in the US were carried out on Google.